We’re proud to mark a new milestone for Cockroach Labs. In a reflection of our continued growth and the overwhelming need for a new database to support cloud-native applications, we’ve closed $87 million in a series D financing round co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bond Capital.
Cockroach Labs was founded on a hypothesis: modern, cloud-native applications will need a new type of database built on a distributed architecture to provide bulletproof resilience and elastic, effortless scale, and we can deliver it. We’ve been humbled and encouraged to see validation of our hypothesis over the past four years, from buzz and feedback on Hacker News, to open source adoption, to Github stars. Since launching our commercial product in 2018, we’ve seen companies large and small (including Equifax, Bose, and Comcast) adopt CockroachDB as their database of choice for mission-critical applications. And in the last twelve months, we’ve seen our first-year customers on average more than double the size of their CockroachDB deployments.
Unsurprisingly, we’re not the only ones excited about this early proof we might be onto something. Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve closed $87 million in a series D financing round, reflecting a year of amazing growth and enabling more to come.
This latest round is co-led Altimeter Capital and Bond Capital, who both bring a unique and innovative perspective, with participation from our existing investors. Altimeter, who led our series C round last August, have proven to be leaders in the bleeding edge data space, with investments including Confluent and Snowflake. Bond brings thoughtful research and expert guidance to both their investors and the startup world at large. We couldn’t be happier to have such great partners by our side.
How Will We Use These Funds? 
As we’re all seeing, the COVID-19 pandemic is changing our world. For many companies it’s become feast or famine. For some, it’s a time to trim costs and find efficiencies to protect their future. Others are seeing explosive growth that is rapidly increasing the need for data resilience and elastic scale. Worldwide stay-at-home orders are putting tremendous load on many services, putting a heavy burden on all levels of the tech stack at these companies. The last holdouts of digital transformation are finally being pushed into the future. That hypothesis we made---that the future would demand a database that could more effortlessly absorb spikes in demand and not lose data throughout hiccups and outages---isn’t a prediction anymore. It’s a reality. And it’s a reality that CockroachDB was purpose-built to meet.
That’s where this new round of funding comes in. Cockroach Labs will put our series D funds to work by doubling down on product development. Whether building a new application or updating an existing application and moving to the cloud, we want to not just provide the best modern database but also make adoption easy. We’ll use these funds to continue adding rich features and capabilities to support your most critical workloads. We’re also continuing to make investments in making CockroachDB even easier to use; improving PostgreSQL compatibility, adding more integrations with development languages and common tools, and investing further in Cockroach Cloud, our database-as-a-service product.
As Tony Baer, principal at dbinsight, recently said: “The cloud is reinventing databases, removing traditional shackles to scale and volume that have constrained them, clearing the way for new forms of globally-distributed applications that weren’t thinkable before.” With these funds, we’re going to make the formerly “unthinkable” the new normal. And to make all of this happen, we’re hiring strategically across all departments.
Thank You to Our Customers & Community
This round of funding, and the growth that enabled it, would not be possible without the support we’ve received from you, our customers and community. At a time when many are suffering from the economic fallout of the global pandemic, we’re more grateful than ever to all the people who help make Cockroach Labs what we are. To all the open core users, the beta release testers, the bug-filers, and feature-requesters, we extend a deep and profound thank-you. Consider this fundraise our continued commitment to you; we’ll continue to focus on engineering what we hope to be the ideal database for our cloud-native future, and building a company you can rely on as a strong, trusted partner that, like our namesake, is built to last.
